Alert: Fake “Unsealed” Product Giveaways on Facebook

A rising trend on Facebook is the creation of fake Facebook pages offering phony giveaways. Today we’ll take a closer look at this trend and some of the more prominent examples.

Fake Promotion
What we’re seeing currently is a Facebook page that begins a slew of activity, posts a photo of a well-known product, and claims to be giving away a large quantity of them because they are unsealed and thus cannot be sold.

These promotions cannot be found on official company websites or Facebook pages because they are fake.

This fake Beats by Dre Facebook page was shut down soon after we contacted the company for a comment.

Why do it?
The biggest question is why someone would bother running a fake promotion, especially if they aren’t even linking to a website of any kind. From our research, we have found that the most likely reason such fake promotions are created is to simply build up a Facebook page with massive amounts of likes. These pages are then sold, renamed, and all traces of their fake promotions are deleted.

Examples
GHD Straighteners. This fake page’s first post was 22 hours ago and claims, “We have got 569 GHD Hair straighteners that can’t be sold because they have been unsealed. Therefore we are giving them away for free. Want a pair? Just Share this photo & Like our page then we will choose 569 people completely at random on 20th March.” Oddly enough, the fake page has more likes than the real GHD page does.

Beats by Dre. We had a full article ready to publish, but this page was shut down soon after we contacted Beats by Dre for a comment  The fake page had an almost identical promotion: “We have got 1,239 boxes of Dre Beats and 250 Monster Beats By Dr Dre Studio Limited Edition that can’t be sold because they have been unsealed. Therefore we are giving them away for free. Want a pair? Just Share this photo & Like our page and we will choose 1,239 people completely at random on March 15th.”

Update: After the fake Beats by Dre pages popped back up, we decided to publish the full article here.

MacBook Pro. We spotted this fake “unsealed” giveaway which asked for users to comment with their country. This is a good way to fool people into commenting, which spreads the image and gains likes faster. Their caption stated:

We have got 50 Macbook Laptop’s that can’t be sold because they have been unsealed so we are giving them away.

If you want a pair, just share this photo and like -> Apple Comment your country below.

iPhone5. In April 2013 we are seeing more iPhone 5 fake “unsealed” giveaways, though the number of likes these pages are receiving appears to be slowing somewhat. Here is a caption from one spotted April 4, 2013 (and submitted by a reader):

We have got 239 boxes of iPhone’s 5 that can’t be sold because they have been unsealed. Therefore we are giving them away for free.

Want one of them? Just Share this photo & Like our page and we will choose 239 people completely at random on 5 April and winners will be posted here.

The photo to the right has been used in dozens, if not hundreds, of these fake “unsealed” giveaway pages.

Have you seen one of these fake promotions on Facebook? Drop us a link in the comments below!

Here is a screenshot of the fake GHD giveaway spotted on March 8, 2013. Notice that it has over 100,000 shares!

Article last updated April 4, 2013